PA members to meet on Symforce Festival?

 

It's wonderful to notice that so many PA members are going to visit the Symforce Festival, most from Holland (of course) but also Germany, Belgium, the UK, France and even Portugal! Can you tell something how you managed to organize this festival with such an amazing line-up? And how about the sales of the tickets? And can we expect a kind of market with CD/DVD/t-shirts sales?

 

 

 

 

as you know Erik, I have been writing about prog for over thirty years now so I do have a lot of phone numbers in my little black book. It has always been a dream of mine to put a European NEARfest together but it soon became obvious there are so many things to take care of and doing something of this magnitude all by yourself without having to put a mortgage on your house is virtually impossible. Also it is my intention not only to put something together for the progheads but to make prog accessible for those who left the progship ten or more years ago. I mean there are so many Genesis fans who turned their backs to the band after "Wind and wuthering" who would be delighted and surprised could they get the chance to hear The Watch for instance. So the bottomline was to put something together which would please both the prog diehard as well as the proglover who is not so fanatic about the genre but who would be tempted to see big names like Flower Kings, Pendragon, and Focus on one bill and take all the rest as a bonus

 

Symforce should be a musical picknick where the audience decides for itself where it will stay longest. As 013 had experience with a similar idea regarding stonerrock based under the Roadburn banner, they were keen to give it a shot. However it proved more difficult than Roadburn to put a decent amount of bands together. First of all the main amount of Roadburn bands have a similar line-up and are happy with some basic drums, amps and speakers. For them it's more the "one, two, three, four, go" spirit all over. In the Symforce case we have to bear in mind the keyboard set-ups, the occasional extra instruments, the often large line-up, harmony vocals, etc...

 

trying to get to see all eleven bands might indeed look virtually impossible but we tried to bear in mind the amount of people coming to see the festival giving them the possibility to absorb an idea of the various bands on offer. The batcave will have a genuine Hammond organ + pedals + lesley which will be used by three out of the four bands (Isopoda uses a Kurzweil with all the sounds as presets). These are the kind of things you have to bear in mind setting up something like Symforce. I remember Progfest once needing no less than three authentic Mellotrons on behalf of Änglagärd which is something they succeeded doing after lots of phonecalls !

 

believe me we have toyed around with lots of names and one of them we saw as a headliner kept us on our toes for five long months before finally saying no. In the meantime one of our other options had agreed to perform somewhere else so it was back to the drawing board. I had some great names and surprises up my sleeve but flying say ten people over from the States and having to rent tons of equipment simply is impossible when it concerns a not so wellknown name. I know Phideaux played the Crescendo festival last week but believe me they probably paid for their flights by themselves. The same applies to Ars Nova when they performed in Uden so many years ago. Numero Ueno paid for the tickets and was happy with hotel and food in exchange for their great set. Of course once the first edition has happened things will go a little easier as a lot of bands will know about the festival and the professional way it is taken care of. With everything under one roof and a team of professional helpers it's a joy to team up with the 013 and hopefully we can steer things in the same direction as the Roadburn festival which once again sold out this year !

 

no idea about ticket sales for the time being but keep promoting the festival and brings as many friends as you can is my moto !

 

regarding CD's, T-shirts, etc... three major prog CD vendors will be present (I will be selling Musea CD's at 10 euro/piece ! if you like a list before send me a mail and I'll reserve the titles for you. They are mainly old titles so don't expect brandnew stock to sell for 10 euro. However what I do have on offer 10 euro is a fantastic price and the discs are brand new most of which even still sealed !), every single artist will have a space to sell merchandise and/or arrange a signing session, internet radio station Laser Radio will have a stall, etc...

 

Bobo

 

I hope you will play at least even with Symforce because you know that Arie Verstegen from The Boerderij has lost a lot of money on concerts with lesser and unknown progrock bands (After Crying 30 spectators, a shame!). He has almost stopped with promoting lesser and unknown progrock bands, I am concerned about that development so I hope your festival will be a success, all interesting ingredients are present, perhaps also Leffe and La Chouffe on draught  ?

 

John, indeed, we must make us Belgians be oroud of us with some of our brews!!

 

That way if those Reserve Belgs from Noord Brabant, want to they can secess from those evil domineering Northern Provinces of Nl.

 

That's all it took us to kick them cheeseheads out of our lowlands!!